Hoax Museum Blog: Photos

Shin Break — I've never seen anyone break a bone in real life. I've never even broken one of my own bones. So I don't have much to go on to decide if this clip of a kickboxer breaking his leg is real or fake. But it sure looks fake, especially the way his foot immediately resembles a limp sock once his shin breaks. But perhaps that's what a broken shin looks like.

Real-life Bonsai Kitten — Bonsai Kittens grown in jars are a hoax. But this video (warning: text ads on the site may not be safe for work) shows a kitten that manages to get in and out of a glass jar quite well. (And the video seems to be real.) It's amazing what some cats can do. My fat cat could never have managed this.

Boa Eats Kangaroo — I don't have any information about this series of photos, other than that it shows a boa eating a kangaroo. And the photos appear to be real. I found them on a Russian-language website.

Giant Ball Crashed Into Building — Here's a picture that's going around, just in time for the upcoming World Cup. Apparently this was created a couple of years ago for a Nike campaign in Mexico. However, the image is just a concept piece created by the JWT agency (i.e. it's photoshopped). This was never done in real life. Pity. It would be a pretty cool piece of urban art if it were real. (via Coolzor)

Alan Abel Videos — I just discovered a whole stash of clips of Alan Abel hoaxes on YouTube (uploaded, I assume, by his daughter, Jenny). There's Omar's School for Beggars, the fake lottery winner, Ban Breast Feeding, the mass fainting on Donahue, and many more. It's a good twenty minutes worth of entertainment. Enjoy.

Firediving Image — A Brazilian ad agency (FCB Brasil) has created some pictures as part of a campaign for a diving magazine, one of which illustrates the firediving urban legend (in which a diver gets scooped up by a helicopter bucket and dumped onto a forest fire). The second picture shows a diver getting shot out of a dam. The tagline is "Read Before Diving." Cute. (via Coolzor)

Miele Billboard — This image of a billboard for Miele vacuums has been circulating around. It's a cool concept for an ad... an enormous vacuum sucking a hot air balloon out of the sky. However, this billboard can't actually be seen anywhere in real life. It's an ad concept dreamed up by Jon Kubik, a student at the Miami Ad School. (via Adrants)

Marvin’s Marvelous Museum Video — This will be the last video I post of one of my trips (for now). I took this one last year, sometime in July, at Marvin's Marvelous Museum in Farmington Hills, Michigan (right outside of Detroit). I was visiting Marvin's Museum because it contains a fake copy of the Cardiff Giant, but the real attraction there is all the bizarre mechanical marvels and coin-operated machines on display. (Though the museum seems to make most of its money from video games.) This video shows Marvin demonstrating one of the machines to me and my wife. If you're ever in the Detroit area, I would highly recommend making the trip to see Marvin's Museum. But bring along a lot of quarters so that you can play with the machines.

Cardiff Giant Video — I'm getting a little carried away with the newfound ability to upload videos to YouTube, but bear with me. I've only got a few of them to share. Here's a video I took last year (July 2005) at the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, New York, current home of the Cardiff Giant. The guy in historical dress was an actor/storyteller giving a dramatic account of the Cardiff Giant hoax to the school children you can see gathered around. At one point during the video I pan left and you can see a brief glimpse, from the side, of my wife, Beverley (she's the one holding a handbag). If you recall, I used a photograph of the Cardiff Giant for a caption contest I held a few months ago.

Nessie Hunting Video — Here's a short video I shot at Loch Ness, showing the Museum of Hoaxes group aboard the Nessie Hunter on Loch Ness. It's not a thrilling video, but unfortunately it's the only one I took the entire trip. Most of the time it never occurred to me to use the movie option on my digital camera, because in the past videos I've taken have ended up sitting in my hard drive never viewed. But I just realized how easy it is to upload videos to YouTube and share them. If I had realized this while in Scotland, I would have taken more of them. Oh well, next time. In the video pay attention to the voice of the tour guide whom you can hear giving a running commentary over the ship's PA system. He sounded just like Sean Connery. (That's actually why I decided to switch to movie mode, so I could record his voice.) Also, the two guys on the far left in the initial scene were not part of our group, but everyone else was.

Plane Flies In Front of Moon — There's some debate over at Flickr concerning whether this image is real or photoshopped. The person who took it (Kris Kros) swears that it's real. But doubts have been raised by Hugo who argues that "such a crisp capture of a jet, in front of an extremely detailed moon, in complete darkness, with no apparent noise, was quite extraordinary." I can't tell one way or the other. Though Hugo is absolutely right to point out that in almost all pictures of planes flying in front of the moon, the turbulence of the jets is visible... but it's not visible in this picture.

Google Adsense Bus — This photo of a London bus displaying Google Adsense ads was posted on the Digital Point Forums on April 2nd. It since has been making its way around the internet. It's definitely photoshopped. The white google ads show no variation in color or shadowing. It was probably some kind of late April Fool's Day joke. Still, it would be a clever form of outdoor advertising. (via Fresh Creation)

Petting A Shark — Nettie forwarded me these pictures that are circulating around in Australia accompanied by this text:

A riding buddy of mine's father has some crazy fishing friends! These were taken down at Windy Harbour - off the South Coast of WA [Western Australia] near Northcliffe. See how close they are to shore!!

Nettie writes "I'd assume they were real enough as we do get some pretty big sharks around here although you'd have to be a complete moron to do what these guys are doing." True, but I'm guessing that the caption is wrong... that the guy in the picture isn't just some "crazy fishing friend." If you look closely at his shirt, you can see that it has a corporate logo on it that includes the word 'Shark' (the only legible word). So I'd assume the guy is a professional and knows what he's doing. Though I'm not sure what exactly it is that he's doing (or where he's doing it).

Diving Tiger — I came across this cool picture of a tiger diving into water. My first thought was that it had to be fake, but from what I can gather (via machine translation) from the comments below the image, the photographer, Sergey Bidun, says that it's real. And he links to other, less spectacular, pictures from the same series. One question that people seem to be asking is why the tiger's claws aren't out. My guess is that it's been declawed.

There's an exhibit like this in Las Vegas where you can see the tigers used in the Siegfried and Roy show. At least, there was the last time I was in Vegas. (I don't know if Siegfried is still doing that show alone, or was it cancelled after Roy's accident?) But I don't think this picture was taken at that exhibit.

Update: Sergey Bidun posts that he took this picture at Six Flags Marine World in Vallejo.

Sun Serpent — Spaceweather.com reports that the Loch Ness Monster has been spotted... on the sun. Check out this picture taken by astrophotographer Gary Palmer of Los Angeles. It does look kind of like a serpent, and by the standards of proof applied to blurry images of Loch Ness, that means it must be a sun serpent! (Apparently the dark shapes are really solar filaments, "relatively cool, dense gas suspended above the surface of the Sun.") (via The Anomalist)

Binary King Galaxy — Dave forwarded me this email he received (which, he noted, was dated April 1, so it seemed a bit suspicious to him). The subject line of the email reads: DEEP-SPACE PHOTO: EP_4277. The text reads: The subject of this photo is a very rare one indeed - taken by NASA with the Hubble space telescope. This is the only documented existence of a binary king galaxy in our known universe.

Astronomy is definitely not my expertise. I wouldn't even be able to find the Big Dipper on a clear night. So although I know what a binary galaxy is (two galaxies orbiting each other), I have no idea what a 'binary king galaxy' is. (A google search pulls up nothing for the term.) I was able to find out that the Hubble space telescope has photographed binary galaxies. For instance, see this BBC article from 1999. But the 1999 image of a binary galaxy looks nothing like the image in Dave's email. So is the picture Dave sent really a Hubble space telescope image of the only binary king galaxy known to astronomers? I have no idea.

Update: Thanks to Brian T. who found the original image, lacking the 'binary king galaxy,' on the Hubble website, thereby proving that the above image is a fake. Now the question is, why did someone fake this? If it's a joke, I don't get it.

Giant Laser — Found on Flickr: a cool picture of a giant laser beaming out of the MMT Telescope, on top of Mt. Hopkins in Arizona. The guy who took it, Filip Pizlo, says it's not photoshopped, and I'm willing to believe him, if only because when I was a grad student at UC San Diego there was a green laser beam similar to this visible in the sky over La Jolla almost every night. I never figured out where it was coming from or what the purpose of it was. It couldn't have been coming from the MMT Telescope in Arizona because that would have been too far away.

Tagging Air Force One — A video on stillfree.com shows a guy (Mark Ecko) spraying graffiti on Air Force One. This involves him avoiding armed guards, climbing over fences, and then sprinting across the tarmac to write "Still Free" on the plane's engine. The video is well done, but fake. As a disclaimer on the site reads: "You, the viewer of the preceeding are hereby advised that the video does not depict a real event. It is intended for the sole, limited and express purpose of entertainment and to induce you, the viewer of the video, to think critically about freedom of expression and speech and the government's responses to the same."

Tree-Nesting Elephant — How did the elephant get up in the tree? I'm guessing photoshop since, as far as I know, elephants are not known to be tree climbers. I don't have any information about the source of this image, but it wouldn't surprise me if it came from a worth1000 contest, or something of that nature.

Cow In A Car — Two pictures, found on flickr (here and here on Alex Laurie's photostream) of a cow in a car:

 

The info accompanying the images states that they were "taken by a friend of a friend in Slovenia." It looks more like a calf than a full-grown cow, so I suppose it would be possible to stuff the animal in the back of your Volkswagen and hit the highway with it. Given that there are two images, and they don't appear to be photoshopped, I'm inclined to say the photos are odd, but real.